A First Report from the UCAR SEA Conference

I’ve been at the UCAR/NCAR Software Engineering Conference in Boulder, CO since Tuesday; there have been a bunch of really neat talks, particularly about Agile programming. Once the talks are all posted online, I’ll talk more about some specific talks (I’ll also talk about some of the AMS Python Symposium talks once they’re available online in March), but for now, let me just mention a few links I’ve learned about:

Functional Thinking: Functional programming, which is not the same as traditional procedural programming, is a “new” way of decomposing programs that is particularly useful for writing programs that work on the cloud. In this first of a series of articles, Neal Ford describes what functional thinking is. His examples are in Java-related languages, but the similarities to Python are enough such that even a non-Java person like me could make sense of them. (Yes, you can do functional programming in Python.)